Pariah Boy
by Ellwood-Luxe
Summary: Draco faces what he's done. Reflective, immediately post-Hogwarts and beyond. Warnings, eventually, for PTSD and self-harm.
1. il est mort

**i. il est mort.**

The tea-stains are getting bigger, deeper, darker.

He burns his tongue on too-hot cups—earl grey, always, no more and no less— to cool it down with a mouthful of rainwater from the cup he keeps on the veranda. The summer days he spends with his windows thrown wide open to hear the unwanted summer rain, watching the trees watch him, not a human in sight. His father's estate is too far from society, from people, to feel like a real place. A floating world away from everything, where nothing could have ever touched him. It's no wonder he came out the way he did, a name was no suitable armor at all—

He sometimes hears the voices echo over the grass, through the branches and leaves, through the undergrowth, calling him over to their side; leave whom you stand with. Come back to us. The haunting laugh, the _He is dead._

Such a shiver had passed through him then, in that courtyard at Hogwarts; he had thought for a moment, back then, that he was back at home with a fever. That the boy dead in the giant's arms was nothing but a nightmare.

 _What have I done,_ he'd thought then, _what have I done._ Because in his heart, he knows that this could have been avoided. He knows he's always been a coward, afraid of his father, afraid of the pale man who commands the world's will.

He's not sure whose side he ever was on, because he was always only in a position of fear, following the rule of the powerful. Ever since he met him, the boy-who-lived, the golden boy, the one who would grow up to be called dead in front of a sobbing crowd.

 _Yes,_ he thinks, _He was really the chosen one._

It's not fondness the way he remembers Harry Potter, but it's not hate, either.


	2. il rêve

**ii. il rêve.**

It smells of wind and wet grass when he falls asleep, doors to the veranda thrown open, raindrops striking the railings.

When he dreams a world of pain opens unto him, and when he awakens is when he thinks seriously about the God he heard so much about, the one that muggles exclaim to when so inclined. _Stupid,_ he thinks, _how could a God do such things when I can do such things?_ Turn milk into honey, water into wine.

 _Maybe God was a wizard,_ he thinks again, and falls back into fretful sleep.

He wishes only for a dreamless slumber, long, dark, one that will last. He won't find it; he'll just keep trying to nurse old hurts by drowning them in endless cups of earl grey.

* * *

 _next: il souhaite._


	3. il souhaite

**iii. il souhaite.**

More often than not Draco awakens in a pool of his own perspiration, a humorless laugh echoing through his ears, the ghost of cold arms embracing him.

A not-so-distant memory. It's only two months, after all, to the day. Summer already half-spent.

Over the Dark Lord's shoulder- cold arms, those cold arms, a scent of decay- he remembers that his mother watched him, his father was apprehensive. And then, in the front, the giant held the body.

 _The_ body. What everyone thought was the very end of the very end.

His bones still shake at the thought, starting in the marrow and shivering right up through his skin.

He didn't understand the ache in his fingertips when the Dark Lord released him to turn and touch the dead boy's face. The fire in his feet was misplaced. To cry out would have been betrayal, folly. He could not defeat the pale man who had just destroyed their one hope for survival, who had taken it upon himself to murder Harry Potter. Hope had died, put out the golden light that might have sustained it.

And so he walked to his mother and clutched her hand like a sniveling boy, then cried out of anger, out of spite, out of longing, out of sheer want.

 _No more fighting,_ he thought, _no more._

He had wanted a cup of tea and sleep, and that's what he got.

Now, the tea-leaves swirl in his cup, whirl him into a trance, and he sees the golden boy's face swim up from the depths.

 _Potter,_ he says quietly, but he does not spit the word with a shot of venom as he used to. It is not fondness that sweetens his tone, and he reminds himself often. _Make me bleed._

He couldn't handle the hurt before, but now it's all he wants.

* * *

 _next: il visite._


	4. il visite

**iv. il visite.**

"You'll have to leave your bedroom sometime," his mother tells him, leaning on the doorframe, clutching her arms about her.

But she hasn't left the estate since they returned, either. While Draco is all shirtsleeves and slacks, his mother is all silk dressing gown and loose hair, a picture of lost vitality. Narcissa Malfoy may not have fought as he did, shot hexes and tasted death, but Draco can see that her battle continues same as his does.

"Have a walk," she says. "in the gardens. The fresh air will do you good- the weather is fine today."

Draco has made a habit of drawing the curtains tight shut when the sun comes out; he knows all about the quality of the weather, as he knows his own heartbeat.

"Please, Draco."

Had it been anyone else he might have sneered a retort, snapped that he did as he pleased, but this was his mother, and she understood.

(and from what he understood he knows she has a debt in the golden boy, too, _is he alive? is he in the castle?-)_

"All right, mother. I'll go."

He doesn't bother with shoes, traveling along packed-dirt paths in his bare feet. The flowers are all dead from the heat, green stalks reaching up into shriveled bulbs, pond lilies wrinkled and drifting in the water, too-still. The sun pricks his eyes and the warmth of it beads sweat along his hairline; _fucking July,_ he thinks, golden light streaming through the trees and along the rim of the hedges.

It's inescapable.

 _"Fuck,"_ he spits, and apparates, thinking, _let me go to where he is._

He lands outside a normal sort of house, barefoot and panting, alongside windows and lattices and steps. It's so ordinary it could be a muggle house.

And then the golden boy happens to open the front door, unchanged, just out of a bath with wet hair. Harry Potter freezes, the metal of his round glasses glinting in the sunlight as he bends down for a newspaper, starting violently when he spots Draco in his front walk.

"What are you doing here?" he asks tentatively, and begins to take the stairs one by one.

The sniveling boy steels himself and blinks, but does not speak.

"Draco," Potter says, moves closer.

"Fuck," Draco says, this time a whisper, and apparates.

* * *

 _next: v. il brûle._


	5. il brûle

**v. il brûle.**

His conscience is almost as dark as the tattoo on his left arm, which happens to also be, now, his biggest regret.

All those times his then-enemy had ended up saving his skin, he's lost count. He had forgotten about the Room of Requirement until now, how Potter could have let him slip, could have let him drop, could have let him die; but he didn't.

How tightly he had clutched to the chosen one's waist as the heat of the flames licked their ankles and tasted their skin. Draco's legs had been raw and red for a week, sensitive to touch and radiating with sickly heat, rubbed with aloe and witch hazel. One could not simply burn wrought from fiendfyre, the healer told him, and he may well carry the scars there for the rest of his life.

Fitting.

He takes his tea without sugar and without cream nowadays, chuckling bitterly over the golden boy. Maybe he's the silver boy, it makes sense. Slytherin colors truncated by how he has always been second best. Then he chuckles more, because gold and silver, at least in a heraldic sense, aren't meant to be mixed.

* * *

 _next: vi. il regarde._


End file.
